Tokwe-Mukosi: When Worst-Case-Scenario Became Real

It was a reservoir that was supposed to bring agricultural life to the drought stricken lands of Chivi South and Muchakata area in Masvingo Province.

As the largest inland dam in the country, Tokwe-Mukosi would be well geared to provide an irrigation venture that would keep the people of Chivi well clear of the threat of perennial famine for a very long time to come. Maybe forever. Add to that the provision of drinking water as well as a hydro-electricity project, and the importance of building the dam would literally be priceless. And yes, with the accelerated construction rate after the dam project was injected with cash two years ago, the fruits of the labour of pooling the waters of Tugwi and Mukosi Rivers are becoming more and more real by the day.

But just a few weeks ago, Tokwe-Mukosi had people chewing their hearts right in their mouths when it threatened to wipe away the very lives of those long-suffering residents of Masvingo South, for which it was ironically built to redeem.

Having grown up in the dusty lands where stunted mopane trees and thorn bushes – the plants of choice in most parts of the semi-arid southern parts of Zimbabwe – fought a hopeless battle to create some respectable distance between themselves and the scorching, sandy arid earth on which they stood; they actually look like Lionel Messi did before doctors in Barcelona stuffed him with drugs that finally saw him gain some height. They must feel as hopeless as the little master did, watching everybody around him grow strong and gigantic while he stayed exactly the same – stunted. Having to endure the stigmatic and stereotypical prejudice about the unspeakable sin the people of Chivi must have committed to invite the eternal hell of drought to their lands, this writer has first-hand experience about the reality of drought and famine in one of the most disliked places in the country. All the good and the bad years.

It is only the elderly in Chivi who have seen more fruitful rainy seasons that have gone by, and they talk of these like a man broods about his lost love. They also remember the bad years – that devastating drought of the 1982 season which still feels like it happened just yesterday. And the one that visited exactly ten years later and wiped all the animal population in the area, leaving it looking like a modern day Golgotha. When the gods finally relented and felt pity for the forsaken lands, the only animals alive were the dogs, because they feasted on the rotting flesh of a litany of their owners’ animal wealth that littered the fields. Even donkeys, made of sterner stuff that can outlive a decent run of drought, were no match for the great famine of 1992.

Since then, the seasons in Chivi have become drier and drier with each passing year. Of course, miracles do happen from time to time; there was the Cyclone Eline just as the millennium turned, that brought an unbelievable amount of rain and left – like all cyclones do – an astonishing trail of devastation and desolation in its trail – swept bridges, destroyed dip tanks, yanked roofs and houses whose floors took more than a year to fully dry up. But Cyclone Eline was an anomaly; in most years, Chivi only has enough rains for small dams to fill so that the livestock will not die of thirst again.

Together with the donor community, agricultural experts brought the concept of conservation farming to the people of Chivi, but many villagers gave up tilling their lands altogether. They could not stand the sight of a health maize crop that showed so much promise of bringing a bumper harvest just before Christmas withering and wilting right before their eyes as El Nino wreaked havoc in the new year. Dry; that what Chivi has become – the jokes may be cruel, but they only confirm the brutal truth that the people have lived for a long time – you do not put your trust in any rainy season to be benevolent. It is a truth that the conservation farming experts discovered in sobering fashion when the moniker they had created for the new farming method, dhigaudye was turned by the people to dhigaufe.

Let us build a dam

A dam would naturally wipe out all of Chivi’s problems like Noah’s flood did during that time when God became so angry with the problems his people created for him that he decided to wipe the whole world out. Not exactly the whole world, as Noah and his family barricaded himself behind an ark and survived the great flood. Likewise, the building of a water reservoir in Chivi would not solve every citizen’s problem – because of their geographical position, residents of Chivi Central and Chivi North might not directly benefit, although they might enjoy by-products like electricity and drinking water. Irrigation water might prove a few kilometres too far. Still, they would feel proud that fellow Chivi residents South of the District will no longer have to face a lifetime of dryness ahead of them.

The confluence of Tugwi and Mukosi Rivers would be a perfect place to dam the waters of the two rivers into a reservoir. There are the Nyoni hills on either sides of the confluence, which rise more than 100metres above the ground, and the distance between them – at 320metres – was narrow enough to sustain a good dam. So, although the building of Tokwe-Mukosi has been in the pipeline since the colonial era, proper groundwork started in 1998 and had to be halted at the turn of the millennium as the sanctions began to take their toll on the finances. The project took an unwittingly long lull, and the building of the wall itself only took off in 2012 when the project received financial injection from government.

Even then, nobody expected it to fill up for another few more years. Briefing a Parliamentary Committee on Peace and Security, the Director Civil Protection Unit, Mr Madzudzo Pawadyira said projections had shown that, after completion – which was scheduled for August this year – the dam would take a minimum of four years to fill up with cubic metres of water worth mentioning. Planners argued that historical intelligence had shown that the rains in Masvingo have been floating somewhere between non-existent and underwhelming; as a result they could go about raising their Concrete Face Rock-fill type of Dam without fear that they would be disturbed by the rains.

After all, this was a very big project; it would be the largest inland water container in the country, with a holding capacity of some billions of cubic metres of water – 1,9billion cubic metres of it to be exact. Five saddle dams would also be built alongside the periphery of the main dam, to ease the pressure of floods, just in case.

Maybe they should have remembered Cyclone Eline and how its waters sunk trees that were thirty metres tall and sitting on considerably high ground, and destroyed infrastructure that was thought to be as strong as the Titanic before it went out to sea.

When trouble came bulldozing…

At its completion, Tokwe-Mukosi would displace about 4,000 families, so as to make enough way for the billion gallons of water that would be trapped in about four years’ time. All this was well-documented and the families to be moved knew of their fate. Actually they had known of it so long ago that when they were finally asked to move, some of them were said to have initially refused to do so, arguing that it had been too long ago that they were told to pack, yet they their hair had grown whiter and their children born their own children and nothing in the slight suggestion of them finally moving location had happened. What had happened now that ensure that this time the promise to move would be made good?

But, according to Mr Pawadyira, the plan was never to move 4,000 families and their 18,746 cattle; donkeys, goats, sheep, chicken, dogs, and all the bric-a-brac they could carry with them at once. You never move 4,000 families at once. It is never done that way.

“The plan was to move families in phases, starting with those in the immediate vicinity of the banks, and spread out as the dam expands,” said the civil protection chief. “And this was done with the assumption that Tokwe-Mukosi would take years to fill up. Lake Kariba took ten years. Phase One of the programme ended in October last year and it was scheduled to have moved about 1,246 families. At that stage the dam would have been built about 660m above sea level.

“Phase Two would move 1,878 families as at October 2014. Phase Three – which would end in October 2015 – would remove about 3,268 from the buffer zone. People would be moved to prepared areas where they would set up new homes. On paper, it was a logical plan.”

True to his word, the plan was working as fine as a clock works. The first batch of targeted families – the ones who lived too close to the river and were likely to be deluged by the very first serious water that filled the dam were moved before the start of the current rainy season. Or they were given the financial resources to do so; because what the government did was sent assessment teams to people’s homes to evaluate what their original homes were worth and pay them the equivalent in cash, so they would feel at home even in another physical location that was not hanging precariously over the edges of a growing body of water.

Some packed their bags and left. Some used the money to build new homes in the new location, but returned to their old bases for just one last nostalgic furrow before their old fields became the bed of a precious liquid. Others – well; others did not attempt to move at all; they accepted their pay check but made no attempt relocate. Like the dam engineers and everybody else, they banked on the 2013/2014 rainy season being another dry one for the Lowveld. And they were proved right to a point – despite a rainfall forecast of normal to above normal by the Meteorological Services Department, the rains were late in arriving all over the country. Convinced that this season, like many others before it, was long gone before it even started, many in Chivi never bothered to even touch a plough with the end of a stick and attempt a dhigaufe.

Of course, through experience, the people could be forgiven for their pessimism about the current season, and through their primitive views on dams, they can be forgiven for not thinking in terms of a dam quickly collecting a lot of water, even when there are no rains in the immediate vicinity of its location.

As explained by Mr Pawadyira, “The river Tugwi’s catchment area is not very far from Harare; it is in Chivhu, actually. People in the Lowveld might not even be aware that it is raining in the catchment area of Tugwi, but the water will still collect via its tributaries and end up there. So in this case, there if flooding from within the immediate area of the Lowveld, and flooding from elsewhere.”

So, when everybody was thinking that a rare but good rainfall season in Chivi was the worst-case scenario for the dam, it happened. Eight times over. It rained in the Midlands. Heavily. Tugwi filled up, slowly at first, then rapidly when the rains spread all over the country as the new year arrived. A woman tried to get out of her kitchen one night and discovered that her whole yard was covered in feet-deep water. She packed up her family and went to higher ground where she spent the night with relatives.

“Somehow she did not return to her homestead the following morning,” narrated the Member-in-Charge Ngundu Police Station, Assistant Inspector Phiri, whose station polices the areas surrounding the Tugwi end of the dam.

“She reported to us that the water levels at the dam had reached her homestead, and probably a handful of her fellow villagers’ as a well. We travelled to her place – and we couldn’t find it. The whole area was now covered by water. A lot of water.”

And more was coming too as the rains pounded the earth in swathes. It seemed all the rains in the world were conspiring to flow into Tugwi and into Mukosi Rivers. Mukosi was choking up, and upriver in Tugwi, the Musavezi; a seasonal stream that supplies Tugwi during the wet season, blew away a bridge along the Shurugwi-Mhandamabwe road in its rush to empty its overflowing contents into Tugwi, which would also have to carry the load dumped into it by the Shashe River as it travelled its meandering way to a barrier that was 672metres high above sea level at that time. It was a height that the building contractor thought would be high enough not to cause any problems throughout the season.

But with the unusually high rainfalls around the dam’s catchment area, it soon became clear to the Italian contractor that a barrier that was a mere 672m high – imposing it may sound – would be no match for the water that was invading the dam in millions of cubic metres; nothing would stop it from overrunning the barrier and washing away all the good work done so far, putting 32,000 families downriver at risk of drowning. They opened the outlet valve, and it did its best, but the flood kept coming; at one time, the amount of water in the dam reached 320million cubic metres. There were red flags everywhere, as people feared for the worst.

“Word even went round that the dam was being eaten from below as the water forced its way through the rock fill and seeped all the way through the 320m barrier to the other side,” said a source at the dam. “And there was a small collapse on the base of the outside wall, but we can guarantee that it was not caused by water seeping through from the reservoir. What we did not want was a situation where the water would flow over the wall. Because if that happens, we know we would have lost. We would have to start from scratch again.”

So they dug out another side-channel, in case water rose higher towards the top. The engineers were confident that their baby was safe – it was upstream that chaos and desolation reigned. At least seven whole villages disappeared under water, just like that – Gwamure, Mafandizvo, Chekai, Tsviyo, Chikosi, Mashenjere and Jawa; they all went underwater. At least there were no human casualties on the Tugwi side, but one man drowned in Mukosi as he tried to rescue his belongings from the flood.

“All our planning has now gone haywire. People are being marooned, and their houses are literally being drowned by the water which (at the time) is getting into the dam at a rate of 560cubic metres per second. The water level is rising all the time.”

So, instead of moving just the homesteads in the red zone, who had already been compensated, government faced the immediate task of transporting 4,000 families affected families at once to safety. That the pathways to safety were muddy and slippery and impassable only worked to complicate matters further. Helicopters and boats were called to rescue more desperate situations, while tractors and scotch carts negotiated the slippery roads as they moved people to the temporary shelters at Zunga Primary School, Kushinga and Gunikuni. From there people would be ferried by lorries to Chingwizi and Masangula (formerly part of the Nuanetsi Ranch), until permanent places can be secured for them.

No doubt it has been one of the large-scale movements of people in this country, so it is small wonder why it took its toll on some shell-shocked villagers who never dreamed they could face such a muddy situation in their lives. More than 10,000 school children would have to shelf the educational privilege for the time being. And they had to spend some days in the transit camps because the transport to ferry them to their new temporary homes was scarce, and they were many. About  2,000 families had been moved at the time of going to press. Two thousand more are still waiting.

“We have been here for two days and haven’t eaten anything since morning,” said one woman, who perched pensively on her seat before a fire, surrounded by empty clay pots, household utilities and thatching grass.